After Donald Trump selected J.D. Vance for his running mate in 2024, more and more of his previous gripes with Trump keep popping up, much to the Republican Party’s dismay.
In two 2016 audios uncovered by CNN’s Andy Kaczynski, Vance appeared on a podcast to promote his book The Hillbilly Elegy and argued that Trump is a fraud who preyed on white voters’ fears to achieve victory.
“I don’t think he actually cares about folks,” said Vance on The Matt Jones Podcast in August 2016. “I think I’m going to vote third party because I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place,” he told NPR that same month.
Audio we uncovered in 2021 of Vance promoting his book in 2016 saying he agreed Trump was a "total fraud" who doesn't care about regular people. pic.twitter.com/UoY7t2HdUt
— Andy Kaczynski (@KFILE) July 16, 2024
Vance criticized Trump throughout his press tours at the time. “I’m definitely not gonna vote for Trump because I think that he’s projecting very complex problems onto simple villains,” Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper before the 2016 election. “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us,” he wrote in October 2016.
Vance built his early political brand on being a “Never Trump” Republican, and the receipts show it. He called Trump a total fraud in public and asked if Trump may be “America’s Hitler” in private. Before the election, in a since-deleted tweet, Vance claimed he would be writing in Evan McMullin, a former CIA officer who ran as an independent. In 2018, he revealed that he did in fact vote for a third-party candidate in 2016.
Since winning his Senate seat in 2022 with Trump’s backing, Vance has changed his tune, deleted tweets, and retracted his negative statements about the former president.
Ever since talk began that Vance could be on the list for vice president, he’s been sucking up to Trump and denouncing his previous views. “He was a great president,” said Vance, who didn’t vote for him, “and it’s one of the reasons why I’m working so hard to make sure he gets a second term.”
